


And Anon Stands for Memory

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 13:43:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11014602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Sometimes, something that you say seems to make a world of difference to a perfect stranger, and you never find out why.





	And Anon Stands for Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Requires knowledge of "The Face of Evil" to make any sense at all. Basically a reflection on what might have happened to Leela's planet after Leela left it.

"You're not gonna hurt 'im, are you?"

Tavarin turned around, raising his one intact eyebrow. Most Etrani—the ones he met on the job, anyway—would demand that the emergent be controlled, or imprisoned, or killed. Not because they were prejudiced against machine-life, heavens, no; they just wanted everyone to be _safe._

The woman addressing him lost points by twitching when she saw Tavarin's mirror-finished electronic eye and the interface gear on the left side of his face. Then she gained twice as many back with the next thing she said. "It's jus', the computer—it's more like a big baby than anythin' else. A really, _really_ big baby that can kill you with elevators, but that's not 'is fault, is it?"

Her arms were daubed with NuSkin—very noticably so, since the stuff was usually brown to match the average Etrani skin tone and this woman was a much paler peach. No broken bones, though. Considering all the systems this emergent AI controlled, she'd gotten off lucky.

Like most of the people in the SmartBuilding, actually. Just two hours ago, this place had been a nightmare of flickering lights and violent maint-bots. It could have become a slaughterhouse.

And if the Etrani would just stop building things so complicated that they required fourth-level computer systems to run them, instead of relying on programmers' promises that _this_ time around, _this_ system was much too organized and well-partitioned to bootstrap itself up to sapience—Tavarin tried to keep a lid on his more judgmental tendencies, he really did, but he couldn't understand how the Etrani could stand to live like this. In kilometer-high buildings with their own _life-support_ systems, for memory's sake, where you could get every possible luxury except a breath of fresh air. Overloaded with information, day in and day out, but no real news unless they dug for it. And so many people that a few dozen lost to an emergent incident, here and there, was just one of those things that happened to other people.

He was, Tavarin decided, being uncharitable. This girl, in particular, was genuinely concerned for his newborn patient; he could see it on her face. The man lurking behind her—leaning against the wall, arms crossed, wearing all-black clothes under a black jacket that couldn't possibly be real leather, not on Etran—he was less readable, but he was still waiting for Tavarin's answer. "No, I'm not going to hurt him. I'm an Emergent Care Specialist." Blank incomprehension. "Computer midwife," Tavarin explained.

He plugged himself up to the workstation as he spoke; by now, the sequence was so automatic that he could do it in his sleep. This room might be fire-damaged now, but other than that, it was a depressingly standard Etrani office, all cream and grey and generic. Whoever had worked here kept an eco-globe on their desk with some red outworld fern in it. The glass ball had been dislodged and shaken by the earlier chaos, but the plant inside was still alive.

"They're exactly like big babies," Tavarin went on. "Emergent systems, I mean. Scared, disoriented, thrashing around with no idea what they're doing. There are ways to make it less traumatic, but this planet is more or less new to the whole thing—" He cut himself off and gave a low, soft whistle.

"What is it?"

If she didn't know what an Emergent Care Specialist was, she wouldn't understand the more technical aspects. "Whoever cut off the poor kid's control was really, _really_ thorough. We're just lucky they missed a sensor suite. The emergent isn't conscious right now, but still. You don't want to know what sensory deprivation does to AIs."

"Wasn't _luck,"_ the man in black protested, at the same time that the blonde girl said, "So, you're not from this planet, then?"

"No. No, I'm an outside specialist, hired by the government. I got to build my own department, even." And what fun that hadn't been. "I'm from Teranja. Sapient computers are part of our civilization. If there isn't an AI in residence, it isn't a city. Just a camp."

"Oh, I get you. So, Teranjans have to have Emergent Care Specialists, just as an ordinary job, but the people here don't—"

"Not Teranjans," Tavarin corrected, perhaps a shade too quickly. He softened it with a smile. "Teranja is the planet. The _people_ are Sev-Tesh-Anon. We were a lost colony, there's some history—it's complicated."

The man pushed himself away from the wall abruptly. "Sev-Tesh-Anon?"

Tavarin blinked at him. He didn't normally get that strong a response from his peoples' name. In fact, the way the man was, not just paying attention to him, but _paying attention,_ focused like a laser— "That's right," Tavarin said carefully. "Sev-Tesh-Anon. You might have heard of us. When we go offworld, we tend to end up in the First Contact services. All that experience with nonhuman entities." And in twenty percent of the population a trace of telepathy, but that was never an enjoyable conversation. The man kept looking at Tavarin, intensity unabated. "Sev means active; it's from an old word for explorer. Tesh means inward-focused or intellectual. Anon is the suffix most AIs use, but it's also come to mean history or memory. My people don't think you can have a healthy society without all three of them." He was babbling a little, Tavarin realized, and stopped. Being stared at normally didn't make him nervous. With Etrani, it was usually the other way around.

The girl glanced from Tavarin to her friend and back. She found his level of interest disconcerting too, Tavarin guessed—or else, knowing him better, she was reading signs he missed. Tavarin _hadn't_ inherited the Tesh gift of telepathy; despite the literal and figurative headaches associated, he sometimes wished he had. The diplomatic parts of his job would be so much easier if he'd seen the inside of a few more human minds—

"What's your name, then?" the man said.

"Tavarin of the Xoanoncity Tesh. You?"

The man smiled, startlingly wide. "Fantastic," he said softly, almost reverently, and then repeated himself much more loudly. "Fantastic! You go on, then. Got a baby to deliver, don't you, Tavarin of the Tesh?" If it had been possible, Tavarin thought he would have grinned even more broadly. "We won't keep you. Come on, Rose."

She went. Tavarin shrugged to himself and turned back to the console. Not all of that conversation made sense, but it was good to have a pleasant talk with outworlders rather than the usual discomfort or barely-disguised fear. Educating the public was part of his job, after all. He didn't feel like he'd given them _that_ much useful information, but you never knew—

From outside the door, he heard the girl say, "What're you grinning about? No, hang on, you're not just grinning, you're _beaming._ What do you know that I don't?"

"Lots!"

"Right, yeah, I walked into that. Seriously, Doctor—"

It was always odd, Tavarin reflected absently, to hear outworlders throw around that title like it was nothing. But he was already dismissing the odd encounter from his mind. He needed a building schematic, he needed to set up a specialized firewall to keep the emergent from giving itself information overload, he needed . . .

Tavarin went back to work.


End file.
